I’ve gone away for the summer and had to leave the self destructive things I do to myself behind. What if I go back to the “real” world and I let this take me over again. It will be so much easier now that I will be living on my own instead of with my family. There will be no one there to notice *I’m engaging in my eating disorder. The things that made me want to stop before which mostly had to do with the fear of being “found out” will no longer be present. It will just be me. *

The goal of everyday * becomes self-harm which seems to happen at every available opportunity. *

Disordered eating was never even part of it to begin with. It was something I never imagined myself doing ever. Period. Everything has happened gradually and then very suddenly. 2 and a half years ago I started wondering about depression. Someone told me that someone else though another person I knew was depressed. The word “depressed” connoted something serious and my thoughts jumped to my only real reference point for depression which was the Depression Hurts commercials. I wanted to know more, so I turned to the internet and began my journey into learning a lot about various mental health issues. Now that I knew what depression was, I saw a few of the symptoms in myself but not enough and to an extent where I had any real reason to be concerned. It wandered from my mind until a month later when very suddenly one day I was fine and the next day I wasn’t. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed, exhausted, emotionally overloaded, and fantasizing about suicide. But I still didn’t think I was depressed. I met most of the criteria on that day, but I remembered reading that symptoms must be present for at least 2 weeks to be considered depression, and I was pretty confident that there was no way I would still feel the same way in 2 weeks from that day. Now I just laugh at that thought because it has not just been 2 weeks, but 2 and a half years. The days, weeks, and months began to pass by and it became apparent to me that I was definitely depressed. So I started trying to figure out why. 2 years ago my conclusion was that I was just too much of a perfectionist with too many unrealistically high expectations of myself and that if I set myself some reasonable goals to work towards and learned not to beat myself up for being anything but highly excellent at everything I do I would start to feel okay again. Time continued to pass and soon it had been a year since that day when I suddenly wasn’t fine anymore. I began to feel rage and hatred towards myself to a degree that I had never felt before. Why did I still feel so low all the time? Why can’t I just get over it and move on with my life? I don’t deserve to feel depressed, my life is great. I am worthless if this is how I’m going to allow myself to feel. Why? Why? Why?! Thoughts of self harm began to creep into my mind. *. For a few months I thought about self harm as a way to be angry at myself and to attempt to release the enormous amount of inexplicable emotional pain I seemed to have inside me. Then suddenly one day I was feeling desperate and impulsive and I did it. I self harmed. I began to do it more and more often. It gave me some sort of satisfaction to be so deliberately hateful towards myself. After awhile it became a daily ritual. It became to much so I decided I had to stop. 10 months later I still haven’t really stopped for good. As I reflect on the last year, I see days that are filled with really intense emotions. Lots of anger, rage, hate, sadness and tears. Sleepless nights. But exhaustion was almost comforting because if I was exhausted then my emotions were less intense. Just like I thought about depression and self harm, I began to think about eating disorders. I thought about it from a very outside perspective and how sad it was and how painful it must be to have to deal with something like that. Then all of a sudden (again) there came a day where I decided I *was going to hurt myself. And it went on for 3 months until I had to stop.

Now I am in a position where things are up in the air. I have this really strong desire to return to my patterns of *self-harm. And I don’t know if I will be able to resist. It scares me because I really don’t know what I am capable of doing to myself and I wish I could just forget about it all and stop. But that’s not an option.

*Edited by the Support Team for triggering content